Photography Guide: White Balance

posted on February 12, 2014

As an amateur photographer, you can go a long, long time without knowing what white balance is or why knowing how to adjust it even matters. I had my first DSLR (my current DSLR, a Canon EOS 450D) for five years before white balance entered my photography glossary, and it took another few months until it felt necessary — or at least convenient — to learn the ins and out of it.

The thing is, if you have a halfway decent camera, it comes equipped with an automatic white balance (AWB) setting, and that generally does the trick unless your lighting is particularly intense. Even then, you may think the weird off-balance colors add to the mood of the picture. Hey, sometimes they do! It’s not something that jumps to the eye as ‘wrong’ the way exposure, depth of field and grain do when they don’t come out right.

But there are certain types of photography where knowing how to get your colors right and accurate is crucial, and once you know it, you can bet it will come in handy on a regular basis.

1. What It Is

White balance is really all-around color balance; the reason it’s often called white balance is that methods for balancing colors often focus on capturing the neutrals — white, black and gray — as accurately as possible. Other colors adjust in relation to the neutrals.

In my experience, it’s just much easier to notice when a neutral is out of whack — or, you know, inaccurate — than when most other colors are. That’s why I didn’t bother to learn about color balance until I decided I wanted pure white backgrounds for some of my product shots and stuff kept coming out so weird I couldn’t for my life correct both the color of the product and the color of the background at the same time. It was one or the other, and in the end mostly it was the trash can.

Polish by brijitsdigits.etsy.com.

2. How It Works

Different lightings have different temperatures, and different temperatures will cause differences in the way your camera perceives and captures colors. Digital Camera World has a handy temperature cheat sheet you can refer to. In short, low color temperature will add a warm (red, orange, yellow) tint to your photographs; think candles, sunsets and lightbulbs. High color temperatures will add blue to your image.

Knowing how to balance color will help you get rid of those tints — or deliberately create them and tweak them for artistic purposes.

Also, the K next to the temperate numbers is for Kelvin, i.e. the degree measuring unit that’s neither Celsius nor Fahrenheit. This is the kind of thing I get fixated on if I stare at it too long so I thought I’d give it a quick mention.

3. How You Can Adjust It

• Presets On Your Camera

Many of the shooting modes on your camera will allow you to change the white balance preset it uses to shoot. The button to access this panel is the one that says WB on it. I know that sounds awfully basic, but humor me; it took me a while to figure it out.

Not all cameras will offer the exact same presets or the same amount of them, but here are some of the options you might encounter there:

Auto/AWB: This works fairly well with temperatures ranging between 3000K (tungsten light) and 7000K (overcast sky). The camera scans the lighting and adjusts the balance according to the color temperature.

Tungsten: Adapts the color balance to low temperature light from tungsten light bulbs, approx. 3000K. It creates a blue tint that makes up for the warmth of the light.

Fluorescent light: Adapts the color balance to low temperature light from white fluorescent light, approx. 4000K. It creates a subtler blue tint to make up for the warm colors of the light.

Daylight: Adapts the color balance to a natural full daylight setting, approx. 5000K. If you’re in that kind of setting, you’ll get about the same results from AWB. That’s why there are so many basic photography tutorials encouraging you shoot in natural daylight. Cameras work wonderfully with it.

Cloudy: Adapts the color balance to higher temperature light from cloudy and hazy skies, approx. 6000K. It creates a reddish tint to make up for the coldness of the light.

Shade: Adapts the color balance to high temperature light from heavily overcast skies and shading, approx. 7000K. It creates a red tint to make up for the coldness of the light.

Flash: Adapts the color balance to low-light conditions when shooting with flash. There’s usually no color temperature number specified for this, but it falls between Daylight and Cloudy and gives your photo that extra warmth that pictures shot with flash tend to lack.

• Manually On Your Camera

You will find one or two more presets in the aforementioned panel:

Kelvin: You can set up the temperature manually in Kelvin degrees.

Custom: This works by showing the camera what a neutral color is. You’ll take a shot of a neutrally colored item — gray cards are common — in the same lighting and circumstances as the photograph you’re looking to take. The camera will adjust the color balance accordingly and keep that setting for the next photograph.

• In Post-Processing

If you shoot in RAW, you can change the color balance of your image in post-processing. I’ve never shot in RAW, so don’t trust me on this.

If you shoot in JPG, there are plenty of photo-editing apps that you can use to fix the color balance should it come out wrong in a picture, and within those apps, there are plenty of tools to fix color balance, too. In Adobe Photoshop, you can get good results from Auto Tone and Auto Color; you can pump up the blues or the reds with Curves, Color Balance (especially Highlights), Hue/Saturation (if the only red is in your background, dial the saturation of Reds down to 0), Selective Color and more. Not all is lost!

But it’s really a pain fixing the red tint on four dozen modeled shots of hats when you could have set up the right white balance on your camera and get it right from the get-go. Unless you’re into that kind of work. I find it exhausting and frustrating and the whole time I want to kick myself, but your mileage may vary!

This is exactly what I need it to improve! Thank you Lix for great tips and I think I will ask you more about it…once I will go throughout my experimentation :)
My problem is when I photographing the paintings… pictures of white always seems like grayish or blueish toned ( where should be a bright white)… I have Nikon HD

Gray is fairly normal unless you’re shooting under really bright lighting (not recommended) or with a very slow shutter speed in normal lighting (also not recommended, you’ll just get overexposed pics). You can always bump up the gray to white in photo-editing software – that’s what I do. :) As for blue, you can definitely get rid of that by following this tutorial and adjusting your white balance. Try the “Cloudy” or the “Shade” settings if you’ve got them.

Lanas Art Studio lanasart

Thank you for your tips again… and I try so many times with daylight in direct light outside in the shade half light… maybe something wrong with me but still have trouble:( I will try to post a blog about my experiences…. maybe you can tell me there what is wrong!
xx